Iraq Solidarity News (Al-Thawra)

Syria’s Children of the Rubble

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:59:00 +0000

The children crowd the concrete terrace halfway up the crumbling apartment block. In the corner, a 6-year-old girl with a ponytail sits hugging her legs, as she has all day, looking as if she wants to shrink and disappear into herself.

She is reluctant to touch the crayons and paper that she and the other children have been given. Asked to draw what comes to mind, one boy has sketched the outline of a tank; another small boy has drawn the artillery battery outside his house.

Going outside, he explains, is dangerous because of constant bombs and explosions. The children are refugees from war-torn Syria, where fighting is in its second year, and more vicious than ever. The oldest child is 14, the youngest 3, and everyone has been uprooted from their daily lives; from school and teachers; from friends and familiar places.

Some have seen relatives killed, friends blown up, or neighbors buried in rubble. But all have witnessed the horror of a country at war with itself. Media coverage of the Syrian conflict focuses on the tangible: on the shooting and killing, on the tactics and military hardware, on the death toll and the wounded.

But the harm is much greater than the estimated number of people killed—36,000 so far. The greatest casualty is the generation of Syrian children who are living with untold grief and trauma.

“I was talking with a rebel fighter the other day who told me how he and his 9-year-old son returned home after a bombing, and how they had to collect the body parts of the boy’s mother and sister into three plastic bags,” says Mohamed Khalil, a psychiatrist and director of the U.K.-based Arab Foundation for Care of Victims of War.

“Skin and flesh were apparently plastered all over. The little boy said later, ‘I want to play with my mother and sister.’ He didn't fully appreciate they were dead.” Studies in Vietnam, Palestine, and Kuwait suggest that children who witness intense violence at a young age will suffer stress disorders that can affect their neurobiology, development, and cognition, thereby scarring them permanently.

Compared to children who haven’t been exposed to violent trauma, children of war experience much higher rates of depression and rage. Symptoms during the early stages include detachment and aggression as well as insomnia, bed-wetting, and nightmares.

Children who suffer stress disorders also risk developing full-blown posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which can give rise to suicidal thoughts and violent behavior later in life. “We have only to look at Iraq in order to understand the potential consequences of the violence in Syria and its impact on children,” says Mike Wessells, a professor at Columbia University and author of Child Soldiers: From Violence to Protection.

Too often, he says, children who have been brutalized will reproduce the violence they experience—not because they are “bad” but because violence has saturated their environment, and become normalized. Additionally, any experiences of loss can create a desire for revenge, he warns.

“The mental health and psychosocial impacts of war endure long past the time of the actual fighting.” Khalil, for one, notes how violence is passed down among the generations. The little boy whose mother and sister were killed, he says, “has been given a 9mm handgun and goes with his father to skirmishes.”

Himself a veteran who served with Egyptian forces in the Persian Gulf War, Khalil regularly travels from London to Lebanon to work with Syrian refugees, helping out Ashraf Al Hafny, who runs a pilot program focused on children.The help is badly needed. In the northern city of Tripoli alone, where Hafny is based, there are as many as 36,000 displaced Syrian children under the age of 16, and, based on his previous work, Hafny estimates that at least one third are at risk of developing severe PTSD.

Hafny, a gentle 28-year-old from Damascus, previously worked on the other side of the equation—starting a program in 2005 to help Iraqi children who had fled with their families to Syria. Now as then, the aim is simple: to ease the children's pain and identify the most traumatized among them in a bid to prevent them from developing PTSD.

The children come from the hardest-hit areas, such as Aleppo, Idlib, Homs, and parts of Damascus, and there are few resources beyond a $60,000 grant donated by the Red Crescent of Qatar. Mostly, Hafny relies on 30-odd volunteers among the Syrian refugees in addition to a few professionals like Khalil who donate time when they can.

And there are just a handful of scientific studies to guide them in their work with the children. “There’s little out there in the region of evidence-based, peer-reviewed studies,” says Khalil. In part, it’s a result of cultural attitudes in the Middle East.

“A lot of people here think that if you’re religious, you are not going to have any mental-health problems—and if you do, you’re a bad Muslim,” he says. “Syrian culture is very macho, too, and you’re not meant to admit to weakness.”Western donors, meanwhile, prefer to work on more immediately solvable problems, such as rehabilitation of those who have been physically wounded, says Khalil. “Women and children are less visible—and so is their pain.”

In all, there are as many as 60,000 Syrian children in Lebanon, and “woefully inadequate funding” to deal with their mental-health needs, according to Annie Bodmen-Roy of Save the Children. Her organization can afford to field just one child psychologist in Lebanon. “This is scary,” she says.Earlier this year, her colleague in Amman, Saba al-Mobaslat, sounded a similar warning of a mental-health crisis among refugee children. “We see kids running in all directions and hiding every time a plane flies over the camp,” said Mobaslat, the program director for Save the Children in Jordan.

“Kids are showing symptoms of PTSD. Their drawings say a lot. It is all about dead bodies and blood. All they can talk about, draw, or describe are tanks and guns.” Volunteers in the Kilis refugee camp on the Turkish-Syrian border have also noticed a change in the children’s behavior—there is more acting out, and most games now focus on battle and fighting, with kids running around shooting imaginary guns, or coming home with bumps and bruises after real-life scuffles.

“There’s really a huge difference in the way kids play,” says Kholod al-Haj, who volunteers as a counselor for adults, and is a mother of young children herself. “It’s all about guns.” One Kilis resident and father of five who goes by the nom de guerre Mohamed Abu Ahmed said that at this critical time when the children most need attention, their parents don’t have the time or the emotional space as they are focused on fighting and surviving.

“Our whole way of thinking has been flipped,” Ahmed said. “Before, the first thing we thought about was our kids—what will their future be like, and how can we prepare for it? But now it’s the last thing we think about. We don’t have time for those things anymore.”

By Jaime Dettmer

PTSD in Gaza: A mental health time-bomb

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:59:00 +0000

The Gaza Community Mental Health Programme is the leading Palestinian non-governmental organisation which provides mental health services to the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip.

In a recent statement, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child warned the recent attack by Israel, has had a "devastating and lasting impact" on children, with "deep trauma and other psychological effects on children on both sides of the border."

One young Palestinian boy reported witnessing his brother’s decapitation when metal from an Israeli bomb tore off the victim’s head as he slept.

Hundreds more have been wounded. And for those children who escape the physical toll of the war, there is a heavy psychological price to be paid. Many are traumatised by what they have seen and heard, terrified by a relentless air campaign, and unable to process the violence and death that surrounds them.

Psychologist Hasan Zeyada, who has worked with the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme since 1991, says the territory’s children are those most at risk during war. “All the things that can help adults – social networks, previous experiences and so on – are not available to children.”

The trauma manifests itself in multiple ways, with children becoming terrified to be left alone, experiencing sleep disorders, becoming aggressive or uncommunicative, and losing the ability to concentrate.

For many of Gaza’s children, the current round of violence will be the second war they have lived through after Operation Cast Lead, the 22-day campaign Israel launched at the end of December 2008 in a bid to stamp out persistent cross-border rocket fire.

“They will re-experience a lot of the trauma they have from the past,” said Zeyada, whose organization is operating crisis intervention teams but their work will be difficult. “The problem here in Gaza is that we are living in a high level of stress and ongoing trauma. No one can guarantee that this will not happen again.”

Studies in Vietnam, Palestine, and Kuwait suggest that children who witness intense violence at a young age will suffer stress disorders that can affect their neurobiology, development, and cognition, thereby scarring them permanently.

Children who suffer stress disorders also risk developing full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which can give rise to suicidal thoughts and violent behaviour later in life.

Diane Araki, the Chief of the UNICEF Field Office in Gaza, said she had witnessed a number of children suffering, saying that "I was seeing children who have been injured by the conflict, and children on ventilators, children bruised, they were very much suffering."

The Gaza Community Mental Health Programme is committed to aid women, children, and victims of violence, torture, and human rights violations. The organization has over 135 employees, is involved with 18 international, regional and local coalitions and networks, and has treated over 20,000 clients – they need your help today.

by Hussein Al-alak

Crisis of an orphaned generation

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:59:00 +0000

A recent survey in Iraq found that between 800,000 to a million Iraqi children have lost one or both of their parents. According to aid workers this figure is a conservative estimate of the many thousands growing up in the shadow of violence.

Twelve-year-old Saif lost both his parents in a bomb attack - in which he was also injured - in the province of Diyala in 2005. "I don't remember what happened," he says, quietly. "I was small. A man came and took me away and afterwards told me what had happened to my mother and father. There is no life when you've lost your mother and father."

Saif is now being brought up in a private orphanage where, despite the trauma he has been through, he enjoys playing computer games and singing, and dreams of becoming an actor. No-one knows the exact number of Iraqi children who, like Saif, have been orphaned by Iraq's unrelenting violence.

But with bombs and assassinations still a daily occurrence, the number of orphans is continually growing. Beyond the individual tragedies, the sheer number of Iraqi orphans has created a social crisis in a country that has less than 200 social workers and psychiatrists put together, for a population of 30 million people.

It has no child protection laws. Officials say that desperately needed welfare legislation has been held hostage to sectarian squabbling in parliament. The orphanage in central Baghdad where Saif lives was set up by Hisham Hassan and funded by private donations.

He told the BBC he could not stand by and watch the suffering of a generation of young Iraqis. "The government has not grasped the size of the problem," he says. Among the 32 boys he looks after are brothers Mustafa and Mortada, aged 10 and 11.

Their mother was killed in a shoot-out and their father disappeared during the height of Iraq's sectarian war. They remember and miss a "good mother" and a father who used to play football with them. Hisham Hassan and his small staff have done their best to create a homely atmosphere at the orphanage.

There is one room for the boys to create art, and a computer room where games are allowed once homework is done. And they are taught to sew and even cut hair. After the harrowing experiences of their past, they are being encouraged to prepare for a better future.

"If they're not properly looked after, when they grow up they will be exploited by terrorists and they will be like bombs - a threat to the security and future of the country," says Mr Hassan. On the other side of the city, in a state-run orphanage for 12- to 18-year-olds, a desperate 17-year-old Mustafa is terrified about his own future.

"I need someone to give me psychological care. Maybe we'll be involved in crimes because there is nothing good in our future," he says. Mustafa was brought to Dar al-Waziriya orphanage after he lost both his parents in a bomb attack when he was 12 years old.

"I feel like a bird in a cage here," he says. "I wish there was someone to listen to us." The orphanage, home to 52 boys, is a dilapidated and disconsolate place - the playground has fallen into disuse, there is no light in the downstairs toilet, and no sink in the bathroom upstairs.

The steps to the boys' dormitories are crumbling and a broken door has not been fixed. "I would like this to be a nice place to live," an eight-year-old boy tells me, shyly. Iraq's Deputy Minister for Social Affairs, Dara Yara, told the BBC that he and his staff are doing their best, in difficult political circumstances.

"We're are working day and night to improve the services we provide to orphans. But the money I'm allocated for this is very limited. And the whole social security system in this country needs reform.

"This is a humanitarian issue and it's not being prioritised by parliament. We need laws and we need money from the ministry of finance to deal with the problem." And he, too, worries about the security consequences if Iraq's orphans are not given the long-term care that they need. "They are," he says, "very easy targets for recruitment by terrorists."

By Caroline Hawley

Iraqi civil war plays out in Syria

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:58:00 +0000

Divided by history, geography and God, Abu Mohammed and Abu Hamza both smoke Marlboro cigarettes and agree on one point: The war for Syria is also a war for Iraq. Driven from their homes by the 2003 US-led war in Iraq, both men, now in their 40s, found refuge for themselves and their families in neighboring Syria.

Nearly a decade later, both are back in the country that once sheltered them. But this time their wives and children are no longer with them. The men are not in Syria to flee a war, but to fight one. Abu Mohammed, a Sunni, is training rebels in Aleppo.

Abu Hamza, a Shiite, is battling alongside President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Damascus. For the war for Syria is morphing into an extension of the relentless struggle between the rival branches of Islam that was so violently unleashed when Washington toppled Saddam Hussein, a secular Baathist dictator, in Baghdad.

“People ask me why a Sunni Iraqi is fighting in Syria and I have a simple answer: ‘I am fighting in Syria to liberate my country, Iraq, from the pro-Iranian Shiite militia,” said Abu Mohammed, 46, dressed in military fatigues, with a short greying beard, cigarette in one hand, sniper rifle in the other.

Iraq, said Abu Mohammed, was now “occupied” by Shiite militias: The Mahdi Army, led by Iraqi cleric Muqtada Sadr who has long ties to Iran; the Badr Brigade, armed and trained in Iran and formerly the armed wing of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq; and Iran’s own Quds Force.

Abu Mohammed considers Syria’s Assad regime ― led by members of the Allawite sect, an ancient off-shoot of Shiite Islam ― to be another arm of Iran’s attempt to dominate the Sunni-majority Middle East. Any war against Assad in Syria is thus a war against Iran’s proxies in Iraq.

“If the Syrians finish the Assad Allawite regime, then Iraqi Sunni can get more support from a new Sunni leader in Syria to finish the Iranian influence in Iraq,” he said. One might expect such overtly sectarian rhetoric to be delivered in anger. But in an interview with GlobalPost in Aleppo, Abu Mohammed was the model of Arab hospitality, softly spoken and thoughtful.

As a former captain in Saddam Hussein’s security services, Abu Mohammed said he fled to Damascus with his wife and two children shortly after the 2003 invasion, via his home province of Anbar, the desert tribal region of western Iraq that borders Syria.

After receiving threats from what he said were Iraqi Shiite militias based in the southern suburbs of Damascus, Abu Mohammed moved his family north to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, where the majority are conservative Sunnis.

There, in addition to starting a thriving business trading cotton socks and underwear between Aleppo and Baghdad, Abu Mohammed said he helped Islamist preachers smuggle Syrian and foreign extremists from Syria into Anbar to fight US-led troops.

All of this, he said, was done with the consent of the then all-powerful Syrian security apparatus. Abu Mohammed’s convergence of interest with the Assad regime quickly fell apart, however, after the brutal crackdown began in March 2011 on Syria’s mainly Sunni-led protest movement.

“I sent my family back to Iraq. For more than a year, Aleppo was away from the problems. But I saw how those Shiite shabiha (pro-regime militiamen) were setting up checkpoints and humiliating Sunni farmers. They put up posters of Iran’s (Ayatollah) Khamenei and Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah.

So I saw it was a sectarian war in Syria between the poor and weak Sunni protesters and the Assad regime, which is getting support from Iran, Hezbollah and Iraq’s (Prime Minister Nouri) Maliki,” he said.

Abu Mohammed said he now makes regular trips back to Anbar, sneaking across the border with help from Syrian rebels, to encourage members of his extended Dulaim Tribe to join the war in Syria. “I am not a particularly religious man but I practice all Islamic rituals and duties. But I am considered very Sunni because of my tribe and how we suffered from Shiite groups in Iraq,” he said.

During the early years of the war, US officials knew Anbar as the heartland of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Al Qaeda found support in Anbar among Sunni tribesman who resented their loss of power after Saddam fell and Shiite death squads began sectarian cleansing in Baghdad’s Sunni-majority neighborhoods.

Abu Mohammed draws from his long years of experience in Saddam’s Baathist security services to help Syrian rebels in Aleppo create a “security apparatus” to root out regime spies. “The intelligence war is very important these days,” Abu Mohammed said. “If we can destroy the headquarters of the security branches in Aleppo, then the whole city will be in our hands in a few days.”

“I am not fighting in Syria to make money,” he insisted when questioned about his source of finances. “I am here looking for jihad for God’s sake. I want to be a martyr, not a mercenary.” In Damascus, two hundred miles south, and some 1,300 years along a different path of religious history, Abu Hamza al-Ta’ay also smoked as he discussed his role in Syria’s civil war.

A burly giant of a man with a shaved head, Abu Hamza dressed in the flowing black robes of a pious Shiite, a symbol of mourning for the death of Imam Ali, who Sunni believe was the fourth of Mohammed’s ‘rightly guided Caliphs,’ but who Shiites insist was his rightful successor.

Abu Hamza was shot in the leg fighting with the Mahdi Army during the May 2004 US assault on Karbala, an Iraqi city holy to Shiites. Afterward, he relocated to the Damascus suburb of Sayeda Zeinab, home to a shrine Shiites believe contains the remains of Prophet Mohammed’s granddaughter.

By 2009, Abu Hamza had moved back to Iraq. But it was to the same shrine in Sayeda Zeinab that he returned, with an estimated 500 to 600 other Iraqi fighters, this July. They came to protect it from the “heretic” Sunnis, he said.

“I kept my ties with the Mahdi Army but stopped any military action inside Iraq. I got married and had three children. I have a small shop in Karbala,” Abu Hamza told GlobalPost as he drank tea in a house near the shrine.

“When the unrest began in Syria I was not interested in it, in the beginning. But later I and all Shiites began to see slogans (by protesters) such as ‘Not Iran nor Hezbollah. We want people who fear God.’ The protesters burned Iranian and Hezbollah flags. We saw them not as protesters, but as anti-Shiite.”

In the middle of the scorching Karbala summer, Abu Hamza said, he had a visit from one of his former Mahdi Army leaders. “He told me I should travel to Syria to protect our shrines from the Damascene Nawasib (Heretics) who took the Caliphate from Imam Ali and killed his sons and grandsons and who today want to kick all Shiites out of Syria. I accepted it as a religious duty,” he said.

Arriving in Sayeda Zeinab after the long overland journey by car from Karbala, Abu Hamza said he was warmly welcomed. Members of the regime’s so-called Popular Committees, a civilian militia paid and armed by Assad’s security forces, gave him a Kalashnikov. Daily patrols of the shrine and mundane searches soon became a battle battle with the mainly Sunni rebels from surrounding Sayeda Zeinab.

“We have experience in this kind of war and how to use heavy weapons,” he said. “We got support from the security services and the government army to face the attacks.” Local people have grown increasingly hostile to Abu Hamza and his black-clad Iraqi militia.

“Most Iraqi Shiite left Sayeda Zeinab so we have become like strangers in the area. We are considered shabiha by the rebels and so should be killed. Syrians have begun to hate us and discriminate against us. They don’t accept to rent us their homes, sell us goods or even drive us in taxis.

When I lived in Syria before, no one asked about my background. But today, it is clear Syrians began to hate Shiites, whether Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi or Iranian.” While Abu Hamza and Abu Mohammed frame their fight as a religious duty, politics is never far away.

Just as in 2003, when Iraq’s future Shiite politicians were living in Damascus, awaiting the outcome of the US-led war in Iraq, so today Abu Hamza sees the political fate of Iraq’s Shiites as being decided in Syria. “The future of Iraq’s Shiite political leaders will be decided in Syria,” he said.

“If the Sunnis win then Iraqi Sunnis are going to lead Iraq again and be stronger because they will get big support from their Syrian brothers. Iran will be weaker and Hezbollah will lose its arms and support.”

BY HUGH MACLEOD

Iraq’s Dark, Dangerous World

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:58:00 +0000

“I was three months pregnant when my husband stole my jewels and abandoned me forever. For this reason, I left Basra. And here I am in Baghdad, where I provide pleasure to anyone who pays.”

This is the beginning of the story of Wardah, 23 years old, which ends today in an apartment downtown, where she is spending the night with a man in return for $250 and a bottle of alcohol. Certainly, her real name is not Wardah, and she may not even be from the city of Basra.

This is how things are for prostitutes in Baghdad. Aliases are part of the precautions they take in a society that chases them down but derives pleasure from them at the same time. It is very difficult to gain the trust of one of the prostitutes.

But most of them feel excited when they talk to journalists. They complain about a country that did not provide them with opportunities for a decent life and perceives them with inferiority. In a police station in Baghdad, scores of prostitutes were put in a small cell following extensive raids across the city.

That night, they received dinner from a luxury restaurant via free delivery service, while unidentified guards ordered the delivery of cigarette packs and other items to them. A police officer told Al-Hayat laughingly: “It is not any different for them in prison. This is a hotel, and they are on vacation.”

Two or three days after Al-Hayat paid a visit to the police station, the girls were set free on a high bail. This is just one of the daily incidents of night life in Baghdad. What the police officer said does not seem to be accurate. The dredges of the city are crushing the girls unabatedly.

In an area close to the eastern center of the capital, high residential buildings are inhabited by a number of women, who are known by young men as “sheikhas.” They are responsible for providing housing for young women working in prostitution, in addition to other services, such as health precautions and protection, under unstable and worrying social and security conditions.

A “sheikha” ensures the safety of prostitutes with the person who pays to escort the girl to his own place. But this method was surpassed by the “sheikhas” through the provision of prostitutes operating out of their own residences.

While a supervisor pays her friends — from the police or members of the various militias responsible for security — the prostitute gets 20% of the money paid by the clients. A sheikha is usually beyond the age that would allow her to provide services herself.

It is difficult for her to attract a man, and even if she succeeds, her fees would be much less than that of a twenty-something young woman. Thus, with time, a prostitute becomes a “sheikha” that manages other prostitutes.

Her main responsibilities are managing sources of funding, and holding dinners with officers or businessmen who carry out suspicious activities in order to make more deals. In a nightclub located in the heart of Baghdad, where the nightlife is recovering after so many years, the police raided the place and closed it.

The raid came as part of wide government-led campaigns against liquor stores and nightclubs. A senior security source told Al-Hayat that “according to a decision from the higher authorities, these recreational facilities are not licensed.”

Officials in Baghdad said that people are outraged over the spread of these places. This came in conjunction with Facebook campaigns named “No to nightclubs.” The nightclub used to be a restaurant. Its colorful façade and part of its interior had been burned down before the place was officially shut down.

Al-Hayat asked a worker at the nightclub about the incident. But he refused to comment and only said that it was “an electrical fault during a night when the club was busy with Eastern dance music, and life does not stop in it until dawn.”

Today, however, the scene from inside the club is not only chaotic — it is one of the strongest signs of contradiction in Baghdad and a witness to the feeling of exhaustion and the weight of life among its people.

Amid this chaos, many men sat at tables surrounding a stage around which revolved girls wearing sexy dance clothes that highlighted parts of their bodies. Everybody here pays for pleasure, and quarrels often happen over one of the girls.

The audience is a mixture of young men depleted from the lack of life opportunities, a handful of rising businessmen made successful after the war and officers who have influence in the area where the club is located.

“Wardah” says that a big number of them are “religious, participate in religious events and activities, and practice rituals regularly.” Clashes between them never end peacefully. A policeman in the area near the club says that “officers were at a party, and it did not end well. The reason was a bet on a girl.”

Without a doubt, these facts are not officially documented, or at least are not discussed in the media. “Wardah,” who keeps her son “Hamada” (4 years) at her friend’s while working, says: “I dance on stage with five girls.

About 15 drunk men open strips of money and throw them on our bodies. Someone who works for the sheikha collects the money. When a man chooses one of us, he pays the fees for a table and a bottle of alcohol, and we finish somewhere else.”

But it's not that simple. “Wardah” who survived an attack a year ago by an addict who is used to beating up his wives with a leather belt, lost a girlfriend of hers who had spent the last night at the house of a drug gang northeast of Baghdad.

She ended up completely disfigured. But the question that everyone is trying to answer is how these girls come to this secret world in the capital. The traditional account says that the Roma lead the night life.

But this account is old and goes back to the time when the pillars of Saddam Hussein's regime used to provide protection for the Roma, since a number of them were eager to spend some time with them.

Al-Hayat spoke to an officer in the “social police,” who had a different story: “Prostitutes are the last link in a long chain that begins with hard-to-reach businessmen and pimps, who invest their money in the sex trade. This is not new to Baghdad.

However, Iraqi girls who have recently returned from countries of asylum have packed the clubs and secret houses.” The officer says that the attempts to expose the pimps end in failure, because some influential groups exert pressure to revive this market.

Meanwhile, when asked about the dismantling of the human trafficking industry in Iraq, Wardah who became an alcoholic, says: “This is just a dream.”

By Ali al-Saray.

Iraq’s women face rising crackdown

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:58:00 +0000

Iraqi women who do not wear the Islamic headscarf, commonly known as the hijab, are increasingly coming under crackdown as conservative Islam gradually permeates the Iraqi political scene.

“Day after day, I am seeing more indicators that there is discrimination against women who choose not to wear hijab in Iraq,” Hanaa Edwar, General Secretary of the non-government organization, Iraqi Al-Amal Association, told Al Arabiya.

Edwar, also founder of Iraqi Women’s Network, sounded the alarm about attempts to force women to wear the hijab, especially in government offices. Head of Iraq’s Ministry of Women, Ibtihal Kasid al-Zubaidi, ordered in January that women working in government offices dress “modestly.”

Zubaidi axed tight pants, short skirts and colorful clothes. Zubaidi, who segregated genders in her ministry, was lambasted as "anti-female" and her ministry described as an "anti-women ministry." Edwar’s Iraqi Women Network, made up of 18 civil society organizations, protested against Zubaidi’s policy, describing it as seeking to curb women’s civil liberties.

More women are approaching Edwar to file their complaints about government institutions and even TV channels belonging to religious political which enforce strict dress code and gender segregation. Edwar, a member of the High Preparatory Committee for National Congress of Iraq, said that there is an interference even with the way some women wear their scarves.

She said, they were forced to cover their chin as well. “There is no legal restraint over the power of a boss or a manager who thinks he or she can control how an employee should dress,” she said, adding “this has become exaggerated.”

Sexual harassment is on the list, Edwar warned, with widowed or divorced women being the number one target. “How many high-ranking bosses have to resign because of this,” she said, in reference to CIA Director David Petraeus’s scandal that forced him to step down.

On Wednesday, Iraq’s Minister of Education, Ali Al-Adeeb warned university professors who “financially blackmailing male students and immorally harassing female students.” The frustration over sexual harassment prompted some women to speak out during a Ministry of Interior conference last month.

“A number of women from the media came and boldly expressed their frustration in front of interior ministry officials about sexual harassment even from the highest of all ranks,” she said. While the interior minister looked nuanced over the sexual harassment discussion, the issue had to be confronted, she added.

The rights activist expressed her woes about the lack of administrative and professional structure in Iraq, adding that corruption in all forms should be fought. “We do not live in a real country. There is no real administration that feels responsible over the country …everyone has become a prince of his own.”

Even when finding employment, professionalism ceased to exist, with people bringing their background or tribal lineage to get a position, she said. Iraq, which was one of the most progressive countries in the region, had the first female cabinet minister in the Arab World and women enjoyed the liberty to pursue their profession.

However, the myriad series of economic sanctions and wars have led to dismantling some of the social and cultural aspects in Iraq. Also, the advent of more Islamist political parties that are more Iran-oriented after the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003 led to the rise of conservatism and new customs in the country.

“In Iraq, we never had temporary marriage. This is clearly an imported phenomenon from Iran,” she said. While in Shiite Islam, temporary marriage is allowed, it was rarely practiced nor was culturally accepted in Iraq as the conventional, permanent type of marriage was prevalent.

Other waves of conservatism in Iraq included the ministry of education banning music and arts in late 2010. The ban was lifted in Jan. 2011 as a more liberal new education minister took office. Late September, human rights groups in Iraq voiced frustration at a wave of assaults on nightclubs and other alcohol-serving places.

By DINA AL-SHIBEEB

NYPD Boots Warms Hearts

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:57:00 +0000

On a cold November night in Times Square, Officer Lawrence DePrimo was working a counterterrorism post when he encountered an older, barefooted homeless man. The officer disappeared for a moment, then returned with a new pair of boots, and knelt to help the man put them on.

The act of kindness would have gone unnoticed and mostly forgotten, had it not been for a tourist from Arizona. Her snapshot — taken with her cellphone on Nov. 14 and posted to the New York Police Department’s official Facebook page late Tuesday — has made Officer DePrimo an overnight Internet hero.

By Wednesday evening, the post had been viewed 1.6 million times, and had attracted nearly 275,000 “likes” and more than 16,000 comments — a runaway hit for a Police Department that waded warily onto the social media platform this summer with mostly canned photos of gun seizures, award ceremonies and the police commissioner.

Among all of those posts, the blurry image of Officer DePrimo kneeling to help the shoeless man as he sat on 42nd Street stood out. “This is definitely the most viral,” said Barbara Chen, a spokeswoman for the department who helps manage its Facebook page.

Thousands of people commented on Facebook and Reddit, which linked to the post on Wednesday. Most of them praised Officer DePrimo, yet some suspected that the photograph had been staged. Many debated whether the officer’s actions were representative of police officers in general, or were just unusually exceptional.

“I still have a grudge against law enforcement everywhere,” wrote one commenter on the police Facebook page. “But my respects to that fine officer.” Officer DePrimo, 25, who joined the department in 2010 and lives with his parents on Long Island, was shocked at the attention.

He was not warned before the photo went online; the department had not learned which officer was in the picture until hours later. The officer, normally assigned to the Sixth Precinct in the West Village, readily recalled the encounter. “It was freezing out and you could see the blisters on the man’s feet,” he said in an interview.

“I had two pairs of socks and I was still cold.” They started talking; he found out the man’s shoe size: 12. As the man walked slowly down Seventh Avenue on his heels, Officer DePrimo went into a Skechers shoe store at about 9:30 p.m.

“We were just kind of shocked,” said Jose Cano, 28, a manager working at the store that night. “Most of us are New Yorkers and we just kind of pass by that kind of thing. Especially in this neighborhood.” Mr. Cano volunteered to give the officer his employee discount to bring down the regular $100 price of the all-weather boots to a little more than $75.

The officer has kept the receipt in his vest since then, he said, “to remind me that sometimes people have it worse.” The photo was taken by Jennifer Foster, a civilian communications director for the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona.She said the moment resonated for personal reasons: She remembered as a young girl seeing her father, a 32-year veteran of the Phoenix police force, buy food for a homeless man. “He squatted down, just like this officer,” she said.

After returning from vacation, she described the picture in an e-mail to the New York Police Department, thinking of it as a sort of a compliment card. She never expected the picture to end up online — “I’m not on Facebook,” she said — but a department official e-mailed her and asked if she would send along the photo so it could be posted.

As for the man he helped, Officer DePrimo never got his name, and he could not be immediately located on Wednesday. “He was the most polite gentleman I had met,” the officer said, adding that the man’s face lit up at the sight of the boots. Officer DePrimo offered him a cup of coffee, but “as soon as the boots were on him, he went on his way, and I just went back to my post.”

By J. DAVID GOODMAN

DePrimo: 'I Had To Help' Homeless Man

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:57:00 +0000

When NYPD Officer Larry DePrimo bought boots for a homeless man who had blisters "the size of his palm,” he never expected anything in return. But now that a photo of the cop's act of kindness has surfaced, the Internet is swelling with praise for the do-gooder.

DePrimo had no idea that an inspired passerby was taking a photo as he knelt down to put a pair of boots on a homeless man’s feet on Nov. 14. But after the tourist photographer posted the tender moment to Facebook, it quickly went viral, garnering more than 400,000 “likes” and celebrity status for DePrimo.

As DePrimo now makes his way around the talk show circuit, he’s been sharing the simple impetus of his good deed. “You could see the blisters [on his feet] from 15 feet away,” DePrimo told CNN of the man who was shivering on that November night in Times Square.

“I knew I had to help him.” DePrimo went to a nearby Sketchers store to buy a pair of thermal socks and $75 insulated winter boots, the Associated Press reports. Jennifer Foster, the tourist from Arizona who happened upon the moving scene, said she was so inspired by what she saw that she had to capture the moment.

“This man’s face lit up like it was Christmas and like, he had just been given, literally, a million dollars,” Foster told the Today Show. Foster told CNN she was particularly inspired because DePrimo's action reminded her of witnessing her own father, who worked in law enforcement, give a man in need breakfast in a donut shop.

While DePrimo continues to get praise from impressed fans online, he’s also getting attention from politicians and higher-ups in the police force.The New York Times reports the police commissioner gave DePrimo a pair of cufflinks in recognition of his good deed, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg tweeted that the officer's story is an “an important reminder to give back this holiday season."

Even more valuable than the thousands of “likes” and the attention he's received, DePrimo said, is how his small act could galvanize more people to help. “It’s a lot about the people,” DePrimo told the Today Show. “You see just great comments. People are saying their faith in humanity is restored and that’s the biggest thing I can take away from all of this.”

The Huffington Post

UK fuel poverty climbs

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:53:00 +0000

The Government unveiled its long-awaited Energy Bill on Thursday. It's the Coalition's blueprint for turning Britain's energy green. But the biggest revelation of Thursday's news was that households will be forced to subsidise the planned, new, low-carbon electricity generators by paying an extra £95 a year on their energy bill by 2020.

Bills are already set to soar in coming years, forcing even more vulnerable people than ever into fuel poverty when they can't afford to heat their homes. Which makes the news – also released on Thursday – that there were 24,000 extra deaths last winter in England and Wales, according to official figures, all the more shocking.

Not all of them were due to people turning down their heating because they couldn't afford to pay their bills, but plenty were. The World Health Organisation reckons that 30 per cent of winter deaths in Europe may be attributable to living in cold homes. If true, that means up to 7,200 people in England and Wales died last year from not living in warm homes.

Ed Matthew, director of the Energy Bill Revolution, which is calling on the Government to use cash raised from carbon taxes to help the fuel poor, said: "The tragedy is that thousands of these deaths are preventable. If UK homes were fully insulated it would significantly reduce the number who die from the cold each year."

On Thursday, protesters from the Fuel Poverty Action Group laid tombstones on the Treasury's steps to illustrate the Government's responsibility for fuel poverty deaths.

One of the campaigners, Joan Grant of the Greater London Pensioners' Association, said: "I try not to put my heating on until 6.30pm in the evening but sometimes I have to give in before and when I do I worry about the bills. It's disgraceful that we should even have to think about keeping warm, but people like me are really frightened."

Research published on Tuesday revealed that the Government has slashed the amount of cash it gives to help those in fuel poverty by a quarter over the last three years. Labour's shadow climate change minister, Luciana Berger, said the current government's policies are pushing more homes into fuel poverty, rather than tackling the problem.

"The most effective way people can save money on their bills is by improving their property's energy efficiency – but ministers are so out of touch they are making it harder to do," she said. With the frost beginning to bite this week, the shocking casualties of soaring energy bills may soon begin to mount up.

But there is some help from the Surviving Winter campaign, which was set up by the Community Foundation Network. It encourages well-off older people to hand over their Winter Fuel Allowance, which is then used to help vulnerable folk.With £200 going to households with pensioners aged 60 to 79 and £300 for those where at least one person is 80, donations quickly grow and some £500,000 has been raised by the campaign during the last 20 days.

More is needed, however.

by SIMON READ

The rose-tinted work programme

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:53:00 +0000

Employment Minister Mark Hoban said he was watching Work Programme firms "like a hawk" as he announced their universal failure to meet their minimum contract standards. The firms were given £433 million of government cash and 836,940 unemployed people.

They were asked to help more of these people get into work than would have found jobs by themselves. The figure for doing nothing - the "deadweight" - was calculated at 5.5 per cent. That's how many of the unemployed people would be expected to get jobs anyway, with no assistance.

Every single firm failed to meet it. The figures show that for all the money they received the firms did worse than nothing. So Hoban has plenty to watch. But watching should be easy. His Tory pals are always hanging out with the firms who have ripped off the public and let down the unemployed.

Former Tory Policy Unit top chap Jonty Olliff Cooper is chief lobbyist for A4E, which took around £50m for finding jobs for just 3.5 per cent of the 100,000 or so unemployed in its charge.

Cooper needed extra Tory help when the firm's failures began to be exposed, so A4E hired Geoff Bridges of lobbyists Quiller Consultants. Bridges was formerly Cameron's aide, while Quiller is owned by a firm run by the chairman of Cameron's constituency party, Lord Chadlington.

Emma Harrison, who owns A4E, was Cameron's adviser on "families." So watching A4E shouldn't be hard for Hoban. The Tories have also had plenty of time to watch another useless firm. Seetec had one of the worst failure rates, getting around 2.8 per cent of the 50,000 unemployed folk they were allocated into jobs in east London and East Anglia.

Seetec has grown fat letting people down. Thanks to government contracts the firm has grown 50-fold and profits have increased 70 times over in just five years. Its current turnover is £53m. Profits stand at £14.6m. Founder and owner Peter Cooper took a £1.7m dividend last year. All the time it was welcoming a steady stream of coalition MPs and ministers.

In March Tory MP Priti Patel posed with Seetec staff and praised "support given by Seetec to my constituents and its involvement in the government's Work Programme." In January Nick Clegg and Chris Grayling visited Seetec offices to praise the firm.

Last December then Tory chair Sayeeda Warsi called on the firm and said she "really enjoyed visiting Seetec. "We're using the very best providers that are out there, such as Seetec in Norwich, to deliver our new Work Programme," she said.

All the information about Seetec's failures was available - I wrote about its history of poor Ofsted reports and profiteering earlier this year. But instead of probing Seetec further, the Tories banned Ofsted from inspecting Work Programme firms.

If state schools came up with results as dismal as A4E's, they would be vilified and replaced. But the Tories' intimate connections with the "benefit-busting" firms helps explain why they ignore their failure. Tories worried about "government overspending" have been silent on a £3 billion programme going nowhere.

The Taxpayers Alliance has also kept quiet about this waste of taxpayers' cash. But there are deeper reasons the Tories indulge these millionaires cheating the benefit system. First, they believe that the unemployed are responsible for unemployment, not a lack of jobs.

Second, they believe the private sector must have the answer. This has opened the door for snake-oil salesmen and con-merchants to set up multimillion-pound firms selling ineffective "job-club" style schemes to the government.

During the boom years, these firms' failure to help the unemployed with their pointless, badly delivered classes on self improvement was barely noticed. Now the recession exposes the failure, Hoban says things will get better.

The sun always shines on incompetent privatisers in Tory eyes. Labour's turnaround on this is very welcome. Margaret Hodge has changed the weather by picking at Work Programme faults. Now it looks like the front bench has caught up.

Even Labour's top Blairite David Miliband tweeted: "We always knew Tories were worse than useless on welfare, now flagship Work Programme has underperformed doing nothing." Ed Miliband attacked Cameron in the Commons for his "historic first ... a welfare-to-work programme where you're more likely to get a job if you're not on the programme."

Yvette Cooper talked about "shocking proof the work programme isn't working." But it remains unclear what Labour proposes in its place. A4E, Working Links, Seetec, Prospects and the other firms profiting from failing the unemployed all rose under the last Labour government.

Seetec's list of celebrity visitors included a stopover by Ed Miliband and Stephen Twigg in April. Even as recently as February 2011 the Employment Related Services Association, lobbyists for A4E, G4s and the like, claimed: "Liam Byrne made clear the Labour Party's support for universal credit and the Work Programme in principle."

Labour had two main programmes for the unemployed - the Flexible New Deal and the Future Jobs Fund. The former was the model for the Work Programme. It featured the same contractors, the same approach of nagging the unemployed in job clubs.

But Labour's £1bn Future Jobs Fund took a quite different approach. It wasn't perfect, but instead of being based on "fairy jobmothers" bothering the jobless the fund subsidised actual jobs for unemployed young people.

I'd rather Labour simply invested in housebuilding - which would create jobs and houses - but the Future Jobs Fund was something. Inevitably, the Tories cancelled the half-decent scheme and ramped up Labour's rubbish privatisation instead.

At the moment Labour refers more to the Future Jobs Fund than the Flexible New Deal, but we need something much stronger to show it's distancing itself from the Work Programme crap. The fact that Byrne, Cooper and both Milibands refuse to say they will scrap the programme is very worrying.

With the Tories facing a major failure, we need to be able to say more than "I told you so." The way to win through the Tories' weakness is make a real promise of something better.

by Solomon Hughes

Lights coming back on for Iraqi cinema

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:27:00 +0000

The din of power generators, tangle of jerry-rigged electric wiring and hassle of security checkpoints are all part of the movie business in Iraq, not to mention the lack of studio space and dearth of experienced crews.

But actors like Sadiq Abbas are just happy to get back to work.

"The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step," Abbas said on the set of a short film shot recently in Baghdad. "Let’s take this as the first step for Iraqi cinema." War and international sanctions have left most of Iraq’s infrastructure and industry -- including the movie industry -- in shambles.

Government funding would have provided the jumpstart the industry needed but it has not been a government priority; the last full length feature financed by the state was in 1990. Independent film producers have struggled on their own. That may be changing.

Nine months after the last US troops left, Iraq’s oil industry is pumping at the highest in decades thanks to multibillion contracts with foreign companies. Everyday life is showing signs of becoming more stable, and the government says it can now look again to funding the arts.

The ministry of culture has put up $4.7 million through to next year, enough to fund 21 movies ranging from full-length features to shorts and documentaries, touching on subjects as sensitive as Shi’ite and Sunni friendships riven by sectarian rivalries and the issue of family honor.

"Hopefully we can pull this off, because in Iraqi cinema history we never produced four films in one year," said Ismail al-Jubouri, the deputy head of cinema and theater department at the ministry of culture. Iraqi cinema dates back to the 1950s, although production did not exceed more than a few films a year even then.

The government’s cinema department was established in 1959 but produced only two feature-length films in the next decade along with a handful of documentaries. During the 24-year rule of Saddam Hussein from 1979, the industry mainly served as a propaganda tool for his Baathist party, which also commissioned art, theater and music.

Films focused mainly on the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war, portraying Iraq as the victor in the conflict, which ended in a stalemate and ceasefire. The film "The Long Days" told Saddam’s life story. The heyday of the industry came in the 1970s, when the government established its first theater, allocated more funds for full-length movies and attracted Arab filmmakers to help.

The first technicolor film was produced in this period, "The Head," directed by Faisal al-Yassiri, who is one of those to have benefited from the government’s latest funding. Iraqi civil servant Mohammed Mahdi, 40, said his mother recalls going to the cinema to watch mainly Egyptian romances with their father, leaving the children with their grandmother.

"It was a romantic thing for them to go to the cinema," Mahdi said, adding with a laugh that his father always fell asleep in the middle. Their dates stopped with the advent of the war, as his father was in the military, Mahdi said. "My mother always regretted the dying of Iraqi cinema."

After the US-led coalition invaded in 2003 and toppled Saddam, movie archives and equipment were looted, and later sectarian violence drained the country of artistic talent. Film production slowed to a crawl and the infrastructure of the industry deteriorated.

Laboratories and cameras fell into disrepair and cinemas were shuttered. Independent film production houses tried to pick up the pieces, with some notable successes such as the privately funded war film, "Son of Babylon," which won a number of international awards and was selected as Iraq’s official entry for the 2011 Academy Awards.

But the return of government funding means a new start for many local directors, even if the amounts are small by international standards. Under the government program, funding for full-length movies can reach as high as 1.25 billion dinars ($1.07 million) while a short film like "A Man’s Tear," which featured actor Abbas in one of the lead roles, can receive up to 74 million dinars.

Only 40 million dinars was allocated to the film industry from 2004 to 2012, said Qasim Mohammed Salman, the head of the ministry’s cinema department and executive producer of the 21 films.

The government’s backing is appreciated, said Saad Abdullah, production manager of "A Man’s Tear," in which two brothers, one who stayed in Iraq and one who went abroad and came back wealthy, become estranged over who will care for their mother.

"I feel they want to support us. They have only given us a little but we will take what we can get," Abdullah said. Not everyone is impressed, however. Kasim Abid, who came back to Iraq after 2003 to teach film production, says the funding initiative is more about scoring political points than promoting local filmmakers. "It is for political propaganda, not for culture," Abid said.

The government’s efforts needed to be part of a coordinated, sustained plan across all the arts, agreed Mufid al-Jazairi, the chairman of the independent Iraqi Organization to Support Culture. "At a time when the private sector is weak, only the government can play that role," Jazairi said.

"We need support in all cultural fields… a base to ignite productivity that can grow over time." Many filmmakers, artists, musicians and performers also say they continue to feel the constraints of religious conservatism in the new Iraq, with Islamist parties and militias trying to impose their radical view of Islam on the arts.

But many filmmakers are hopeful Iraqis will eventually come back to the cinemas. "It’s the audience in the end who decides. They are the consumers and they are the ones who bring the money to the cinema by buying tickets," said Raad Mshatat, the director of "The Silence of the Shepherd," a full-length film.

"I have high hopes Iraqi cinema will come back to life."

By Aseel Kami, Reuters

Iraqs social welfare flip-flop

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:27:00 +0000

It’s not the first time the Iraqi government has tried to abolish the ration card system. And it won’t be the last. Kufa University’s Hassan al-Zubaidi, an adviser on poverty reduction, explains why the ration card just won’t go away.

Last week the Iraqi Cabinet announced plans to abolish the ration card system, with which the government gives out household staples to the populace. The scrapping of the social welfare plan, which is over 20 years old, was seen as an important step toward economic development in the private sector; it’s something that has long been recommended by economic analysts.

However, only five days after the decision was made, it proved to be so controversial – some have described it as political dynamite – that it was reversed. The ration card system was introduced to Iraq by the regime of former leader Saddam Hussein.

A form of social welfare, the national food assistance programme began in the early 1990s after sanctions were imposed on Iraq following the country’s invasion of Kuwait. It allowed card holders to claim a variety of household staples.

However since the US-led invasion of Iraq that toppled Hussein’s government in 2003, the ration card system has been failing dramatically, plagued by inefficiency, widespread corruption and security issues.

The long process of getting flour, rice, sugar, cooking oil, baby milk and other relevant staples from government warehouses into the hands of citizens as well the poor quality of the distributed items has made the ration card system more of a burden than a saviour.

Today there is no doubt that the system is an ever growing burden on the Iraqi government. As an article by news agency AFP noted: “a report by the International Monetary Fund in February 2010 described the system as ‘an inefficient generalised benefit that distorts private sector activity’."

The ration card system now serves double the amount of Iraqis it did when it was first introduced and that number is expected to increase by 800,000 annually simply because of population growth.

All of which requires huge financial and human resources – resources that are lacking partially because of corruption within the relevant government departments that leads to waste - and partially because the Iraqi government simply doesn’t have the means to finance the scheme.

According to the United Nations, the ration card funding accounts for about 7 percent of the federal budget. The current Iraqi government has already said that it inherited the system from the former regime and that it could see no logical reason for keeping it – especially since international sanctions on Iraq were abolished some time ago.

Scrapping the system would help move the Iraq towards becoming a real market economy and would make Iraqi consumers less dependent, they said. However there are plenty of things that have made cancelling the ration card system very difficult.

Certainly after the 2003 US-led invasion, as the security situation in Iraq deteriorated, there was more of a need for some sort of social welfare programme to protect Iraq’s vulnerable. The government is also well aware of the political significance of the ration card; they know only too well that the Iraqi people now see it as a basic right, no matter whether or not they actually still need the staples provided by the system.

So in many ways perhaps it’s no surprise that this latest attempt to scrap the ration card system failed. After all, this is just one in a long line of attempts to reform or adjust the scheme. In 2010 the Ministry of Trade initiated a plan to cancel ration cards for people earning more than IQD1.5 million (US$1,000) a month.

But this didn’t make much impact on the overall scheme because only about 60,000 people out of the 31 million in the system were covered by that step - most of those were high ranking civil servants. Even when ration cards were cancelled for the second tier of income earners – between 270,000 and 300,000 more people – the amendment didn’t make much of a dent in the system.

Later in 2010, another plan was instituted – the items available through the ration card would be reduced to just five basics: flour, rice, sugar, cooking oil and baby milk. However according to a 2011 survey by the Iraqi Knowledge Network, a statistics and research offshoot of the federal Ministry of Planning, over three quarters (80 percent) of Iraqi families who had ration cards had only ever received one of the items on the ration card list between 2010 and 2011.

Only 65 percent had only ever managed to lay hands on two of the items on the list in the same period and exactly a quarter had managed to get three of the items. Astoundingly less than 5 percent of the eligible families had ever had all five items.

All of which clearly reflects the kinds of problems that plague the system. That also indicates that just reducing the goods the card entitles holders to, can’t make much difference either.

Received through ration card system

Flour: 71%

Rice: 64%

Cooking oil: 30%

Baby milk: 5% of eligible families

However there’s also no doubt that cancelling the system outright as proposed last week, would have lead to further problems. Various reports from as far back as 2004 have concluded that scrapping the ration card system would lead to lower living standards in Iraq in general.

There are a large number of food-insecure individuals in Iraq – early estimates range from between 11 and 16 percent of the population – and analysts have suggested that that number could double or even triple should the ration card system be scrapped.

So for the time being, the Iraqi government, having rescinded its earlier decision to get rid of the system altogether, has decided that citizens may now have a choice – choose the ration card which allegedly supplies around IQD12,000 worth of goods or a cash payout of IQD15,000 per month.

Of course there are no guarantees that the cash will be used by the needy to buy the food they need and there’s obviously still plenty of room for social welfare fraud and for corruption.

Only one thing seems certain when it comes to the ration card: with elections coming up in Iraq soon – they’re planned for early 2013 - it also seems highly unlikely there will be any further major “improvements” made to the ration card system in the near future.

By Niqash

Selling vegetables despite Paralympic medal

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:27:00 +0000

For a moment, Ahmed Naas thought his life would change — he overcame the odds to not just qualify for the Paralympics, but briefly held a world record, and was eventually awarded a silver medal. He dreamed of fame in his native Iraq, adulation from his friends and compatriots, and a chance to secure his family’s future.

He was a champion and a hero. But then he came home. “I thought I’d be a king of sport in Iraq, I thought I would live like a king, that I would be a symbol for Iraq,” said the 20-year-old. “But, what I found when I returned was the same old life. Nothing changed.”

Despite combined prize money from various Iraqi government sources of around $33,000, which he has used to purchase a small plot of land, Naas is back to work at his family’s grocery stall, is again training in spartan conditions, and living with his extended family.

Naas won over massive crowds at London’s Olympic stadium when, after hurling his javelin 43.27 metres and setting a world record in the F40 category. He was eventually beaten by China’s Wang Zhiming, who shattered Naas’s record to claim gold.

The result, though disappointing, remained impressive considering Naas only took up the javelin full-time earlier this year, and indeed had stopped training completely for a year in 2009 when one coach told him he lacked the athleticism that is required to compete.

He lives with his father, seven brothers and extended family in a small one-storey house. He still trudges to the family’s vegetable stall five days a week, where he works five hours a day, scraping together between $15 and $25 a day between him and three brothers.

“I find it very hard to deal with the fact that, after all my achievements, I had to go back to my old job. I was very proud of myself. I feel like I deserve better than going back to the same work. I go back to the same places to train, the same life. Even when I came back to Iraq, even in the airport, there was no one there waiting for me. You can imagine, I took a taxi from Baghdad to here, alone. No one cared.”

Naas works out on the roof of his family’s home with a small weighted ball gifted to him by a coach and a barbell he has fashioned out of an empty metal pipe connected to two metal cannisters filled with cement. He has no idea how much the barbell weighs but completes multiple sets of lifts before attempting to throw the ball the length of the roof.

Naas then walks for around half an hour, even in Iraq’s boiling summer, on what he calls a training ground, but which is in reality a tract of dirt between a railway track and a main road. “A champion should not have to go to a stall, to become a grocer. There should be another option.”

By AFP

Crisis team to pursue Child Killers

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:26:00 +0000

The Iraqi Interior Ministry announced on Saturday (November 10th) that a crisis team was formed to pursue gunmen involved in recent attacks on several children's schools and parks in various Iraqi cities.

Ministry spokesperson Col. Saad Maan told Mawtani that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered the creation of the crisis team, which was tasked with analysing the recent attacks and finding their perpetrators as swiftly as possible.

In the past two weeks, security forces arrested "17 al-Qaeda gunmen who confessed they targeted areas where civilians, including children, gather, such as a children's hospital, a school, an amusement park and a soccer field", he said.

According to Maan, "there are several reasons for the recent rise in the number of terrorist attacks directly targeting children, the most important of which is a floundering al-Qaeda and its members' inclination to launch attacks that are not dangerous for them and in unexpected areas, such as children's schools."

By launching such attacks, al-Qaeda is also trying to terrorise citizens and the children's parents, re-instilling fear in them to prevent them from co-operating with Iraqi security forces, he added. "Al-Qaeda's attacks on children are not new," Maan said.

"From [children] recruitment into the Birds of Paradise organisation, to using them to deliver explosives and messages, or using them to blackmail their parents or force those who work for security forces to surrender to them and be killed -- all of this is further evidence of the legitimacy of organisations killing and fighting [al-Qaeda members]."

Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq told Mawtani, "The enemy we are fighting has no mercy or compassion, for killing schoolchildren cannot be justified by any of their slogans."He said in September, "about 30 Iraqi children were killed and another 30 were wounded in seven bombings in Kirkuk, Baghdad, Anbar, Mosul and Salaheddine, with five of these attacks directly targeting children".

Aifan al-Essawi, secretary of the parliamentary defence and security committee, said the main reasons "al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups continue to target children" include the "growing skill of security forces in pursuing" these groups, and "al-Qaeda's failure to reach government and security facilities".

"So they resorted to targeting public marketplaces, children's schools, gardens and parks, and that is a sign of weakness," he said. On Thursday, the Fallujah police arrested an al-Qaeda member who confessed he had targeted a soccer field where four children were playing, according to al-Essawi.

Three of the children's fathers are policemen, and the fourth child's father works for the Sahwa forces, he added. "We believe these increasing [attacks] will end soon and swiftly through joint co-operation between security forces and Iraqi citizens," he said.

Dr. Waleed al-Karbalai, co-ordinator of a children's treatment programme at the Iraqi Health Ministry, said the government launched a programme titled "Humanitarian Airlift to Germany". "Through this programme, 22 children wounded in terrorist attacks were taken to Germany at the [Iraqi] state's expense, including six who needed to be fitted for prosthetics," he said.

About 200 other children will also be sent to German hospitals by the end of the year to receive treatment for injuries suffered in such attacks, he added.

By Mohammad al-Qaisi in Baghdad

Exodus to Iraqi Kurdistan

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:26:00 +0000

Six-year-old Helen, wearing her best blue dress and stockings and a flower in her hair for the journey to her new unknown home, glances at her mother before reaching out gingerly to touch the barrel of the Kalashnikov slung across the shoulder of a Kurdish militiaman as he takes the names of the families in line.

Helen and her mother and two baby sisters, Syrian Kurds from the town of Hassakeh, are among hundreds of people who fill a disused barn now operating as a quasi-legal refugee office, controlled by the Kurdish YPG militia to register people crossing to Iraqi Kurdistan. “The [rebel] Free Syrian Army and the [Syrian] regime were fighting every night. We couldn’t sleep,” her mother explains.

They are heading to Iraqi Kurdistan, where Helen’s father is seeking work. But the future is uncertain. The crowd streamed in from the early morning Tuesday. The refugees make their way across in taxis, pickup trucks and on foot, carrying plastic bags and suitcases crammed with their life’s possessions. By midday, the gathering had swelled to well over 500.

Then, the bad news arrived. “Maliki’s soldiers have closed the borders,” explains a YPG fighter, referring to the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. “Everyone just take a seat. We are working on it.” The YPG, the civilian militia affiliated with the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), is managing this makeshift crossing.

There is no telling how long the wait will be, and so, with cold rain setting in, the barn quickly turns into an interim refugee camp. What began as an orderly line starts to fray as the wait continues and the realization sets in that the barn may be home for days, if not weeks.

As more bad news arrives from PYD officials, the crowd begins to shout and surge forward. But there is no movement. As desperation grows, dignity recedes. Families who are leaving behind their homes, jobs, school, television and family meals, look increasingly bedraggled. Mothers hand out packed rations of biscuits and juice to restless children.

Another woman carefully and surreptitiously unfurls a narrow sleeve of Syrian pounds from inside her abaya, to count her savings, thumbing through the notes three times. By 3 p.m., the PYD official says there is no use – the Iraqi troops will not relent. “Go home and try again tomorrow,” he tells the crowd, but many have nowhere to go home to.

Ethnic and religious differences, which have increasingly come to the fore and worked to define Syria’s war as a sectarian conflict, dissipate here. Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Iraqis, with opposing political views and from across the country, sit side by side, sharing tea and tales.

Fresh from the city of Malikieh, where PYD forces took over control from Syrian government troops a day earlier, Youssef says he left after losing his job at a Turkish engineering company. He hopes to find work in Dohuk in Iraqi Kurdistan. Hassan, a Kurd, has just arrived from the town of Ras al-Ain on Syria’s border with Turkey, and is sitting alongside a seasoned PYD fighter from Qamishli.

Ras al-Ain has been overrun by FSA fighters in recent days, with Syrian warplanes striking the area, as Kurdish fighters seek to maintain a presence. The smugglers’ route along Syria’s northeastern frontier with Iraq has been inundated with refugees every day. On Monday alone, one border official tells The Daily Star, 1,000 people registered to cross.

Only a few hundred were allowed through. Iraqi troops and the Kurdish Peshmerga co-manage the checkpoints around the border between Iraqi Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq, close to the disputed Iraqi city of Mosul. But, nervous that a spillover of the Syrian crisis may rock the already tense situation has meant that government troops have increased their presence along the border, extending northward.

Tense relations between Baghdad and the semi-autonomous resource rich Kurdistan don’t help matters. Neither does the less than amicable relationship between the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraqi Kurdistan and Syria’s PYD, affiliated with the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), which has fought a decades-long war with Turkey along the northern border.

The refugees are less than welcome by any side. When word does finally come through that a change of guard at the crossing has meant several trucks full of people can pass, families clamor for a place on the back of two cattle carriers for the five-kilometer ride to the border.

Once there, a border official tells The Daily Star the order to stop the passage “came from Baghdad.” Laden with bags, they walk another three kilometers across the rocky Girecep mountain plains to the Iraqi border post near the village of Shilokiyeh.

It is difficult terrain, littered with land mines and marked ominously with red painted wooden posts. Carrying tired children and suitcases, they form a dark human trail of suffering across the otherwise picturesque dusk landscape.

Fatima, a mother of five making the journey alone while her husband waits behind in Hassakeh told The Daily Star she hoped to make it to one of the overcrowded refugee camps in Dormiz, near Dohuk. ‘I don’t care where I go, anywhere is better than where we came from,” she says.

But in an ominous sign, a Syrian man greeting the trail waves and offers a word of advice to the newcomers: “Go back, I tell you, it’s better in Syria.”

By Lauren Williams

Court Seeks to Limit Shariah

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:26:00 +0000

Iraq’s parliamentary Legal Committee said on Nov. 13, that the High Judicial Council has reservations regarding a law stipulating that Islamic Shariah jurists have the right to “veto” laws. Controversy over the Federal Court Act has been caught in a vicious circle since the act was first proposed by the government more than a year ago.

The dispute revolves around a number of issues: the fact that Islamic Shariah jurists — who are members of the court — were given the right to veto laws, the possible unification of the court chairmanship and the High Judicial Council chairmanship, and the mechanisms to appoint the court’s chairman.

Azad Abou Bakr, a member of the parliamentary Legal Committee, told Al-Hayat that “the judiciary expressed its reservations regarding an article on Islamic Shariah jurists, since it would change the court’s character from legal to juristic, as was mentioned in the High Judicial Council’s letter to the committee.

Therefore, the committee is required to review the bill.” He explained that “the bill will be presented for debate in parliament next week and there are attempts to pass it alongside other laws, such as the prisoner amnesty and deferred-payment laws.

He added: “Political differences will once again prevent voting on the Federal Court and the High Judicial Council laws, although both laws were drafted more than a year ago. The controversy began when parliamentary blocs were requested to grant Islamic Shariah jurists the right to veto in court and to revoke laws adopted by parliament.

However, other parliamentary blocs considered that request a consolidation of religious concepts in a civil state.” Bakr continued: “It is impossible to give a specific group the right to use the veto against a majority in court.”

National Alliance MP Hassoun al-Fatlawi told Al-Hayat that “the alliance insists on granting the veto right to Islamic Shariah jurists in court, because the constitution stipulated that and stressed that the judiciary must respect the principles of Islam.”Fatlawi, also a member of the al-Mowaten parliamentary bloc, explained that al-Mowaten and the Sadrist Movement parliamentary bloc adopted this position more than a year ago.

Head of the Iraqiya List Ayad Allawi expressed his willingness to attend the national conference convened by President Jalal Talabani, provided that three demands are fulfilled, namely a commitment to implement the Erbil agreement, find a solution the issue of political prisoners, and settle the Federal Court Act.

By: Omar Sattar. Translated from Al-Hayat (Pan Arab).

Doctor’s journey to Iraqi colleagues

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:26:00 +0000

A doctor from Bedford Hospital has returned from war-torn Iraq, where he was bringing his Arabic colleagues up to speed with the latest developments in his specialist field. Professor Robert Thomas was the first non-Iraqi doctor to give a scientific presentation at the first Cancer Conference to be held there following the recent conflict.

The two-day conference in Baghdad saw delegates guarded by concrete blast walls, tanks and Kalashnikovs as the country’s local oncologists were updated on the latest developments in the management of patients diagnosed with cancer, Professor Thomas, who is a consultant oncologist at Bedford Hospital, and teaches at both Cranfield and Cambridge University, said: “Although the security situation has improved enormously there were still three fatal bombs in the city in the days before and after the visit and gunshot could be heard throughout the conference.

“Most of the Iraqi doctors who attended the conference would not have been able to travel to international conferences in recent times to take advantage of the learning opportunities available. “It was a privilege to travel to Iraq and to be able to help the country’s doctors improve cancer care for their people.”

He added: “After I was given this opportunity, I felt compelled to accept, despite the obvious risks.“Even though I am only one person and just a civilian, this conference is a symbol of peace and however small the impact on the eventual end of their internal conflict, it is my duty to help.”

By Bedford Today

Iraq ration reform sparks anger

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:25:00 +0000

Armed with a key reform touted by economists but angrily opposed by many voters, Iraq's government is mired in controversy over its now-withdrawn plans to cancel the country's biggest social programme.

Ministers had decided last week to scrap the ration card programme, a food distribution system inaugurated by Saddam Hussein after Iraq was slapped with an embargo, a decision lauded by analysts who have long described it as inefficient and riven with corruption.

Faced with vociferous opposition from clerics, MPs and many of the country's citizens, however, the government backed down and now says it will now allow Iraqis to choose -- they can opt either for a monthly cash payment of 25,000 dinars, about $20, or the regular allocation of a handful of food items.

"This is ridiculous," said Kamal al-Basri, an economist with the Baghdad-based Iraqi Institute for Economic Reform (IIER). "This is a measure we have been waiting for since 2004." "This is a very important economic reform and it should take place."

Basri complained of corruption and leakages in the ration card programme noting that the long process of getting food from government warehouses into the hands of citizens was "not straightforward." "At every step, there are some leaks."

He added that it also "prevents the development of a private sector." The programme was first implemented in 1991 with dozens of critical food items, serving as a way for Iraqis to survive as the country dealt with the international embargo.

It has since been scaled back, but Iraqis still receive flour, rice, sugar, cooking oil and baby milk at government-appointed shops. Despite the reduction in the number of items, the programme still accounts for seven percent of the country's budget according to the United Nations, greater than both the health and education budgets.

It is this financial burden that troubles many who have advocated its reform. A report by the International Monetary Fund in February 2010 described the system as "an inefficient generalised benefit that distorts private sector activity."

It called for high-earners to be barred from being able to claim the food, and said the number and the volume of goods should be reduced. By comparison, a direct cash transfer into the hands of Iraqis would serve as "a way to empower people," according to one Western diplomat posted in Baghdad, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

But pointing to provincial elections next year and parliamentary polls due in 2014, the diplomat said it would be any major reform of Iraq's food distribution programme was unlikely in the coming years. "No one will have the stomach to tackle this now, unless they want to make a big political issue out of it."

"It is toxic," the diplomat noted. This despite some early evidence that indicates poor Iraqis would prefer a cash handout to an allocation of food that is often of low quality. According to an IIER survey of 400 families in the poor Baghdad neighbourhoods of Sadr City and Hai al-Tareq, two-thirds of respondents said they would prefer to receive money rather than food.

Regardless, the diplomat noted, in a country where an estimated 23 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, according to figures compiled by the Planning Ministry, cancelling or even transforming a two-decade-old programme on which many voters depend has a "political cost".

For proof, one only needs to visit neighbourhoods like Camp Sara, a largely Christian area of east Baghdad, where many residents barely survive -- sidewalks are in disrepair, visitors can see young girls digging through garbage, and electrical wires dangle within arm's reach.

Since 1991, residents of Camp Sara have depended on the monthly allocation to at least provide them with the bare essentials, a list that though much less generous than in years past, still helps the poor eke out an existence.

So, if given a choice, Amira Ismail said she would cling to the ration card programme at all costs. "My husband is a taxi driver," she said. "How will we make ends meet if the ration card is taken away? This would be a disaster." "What will he do? Will he become a terrorist to make a living?"

By Guillaume Decamme

UK poverty getting worse

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:25:00 +0000

POVERTY levels in the UK now are worse than they were 30 years ago, when the charity Church Action on Poverty (CAP) was first created, its national co-ordinator, Niall Cooper, has said.

Poverty today was "much worse" than in the early 1980s, and was due to get worse, as the impact of the Government's spending and welfare cuts began to bite, he said. Mr Cooper was speaking as the charity marked its 30th anniversary with the launch of a new five-year programme to train congregations to address economic hardship in their area, and tackle the negative perceptions of people in poverty.

"People are more willing to judge people and see them as the cause of poverty," he said. "Much needs to be done to challenge these perceptions, including in our own community. We often think of our churches like glasses that are half empty. We think about what they can't do, but they are still very powerful bodies. The need for churches to work to address the underlying issues behind poverty is greater than at any time in the past 30 years."

The charity has also announced the opening of a further 21 debt counselling centres in churches. The Labour MP Paul Goggins, director of CAP between 1989 and 1997, said: "Church Action on Poverty was founded in response to deep concern within the churches about homelessness, long-term unemployment, and benefit cuts. These remain substantial issues 30 years on. . .

"CAP has always sought to give those on the margins of our society a stronger voice and a real say in policy-making. Not only does this bring real experiences to bear: it also reflects a different order in which all are valued and respected."

The charity cites among its achievements lobbying the Government to invest in credit unions, which led to the setting up of a £180-million fund. It has also been lobbying successive governments - less successfully - for a decade for a ceiling to be set on interest rates, to combat loan sharks.

A recent investigation by The Independent found that some pay-day lenders are offering Christmas loans with a 4248-per-cent APR. CAP is also working on the Living Wage campaign ( News, 5 October), which will be debated at the General Synod next week.

The charity works to help churches address the underlying issues of inequality and poverty, and think beyond their immediate response of setting up food banks and offering debt advice. It also trains residents in poor communities to empower them to ask questions, and have a say in community projects.

Democracy no good for the poor

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:25:00 +0000

With the majority of voters in many African countries being rural and economically disadvantaged, an increase in democracy could be expected to favour politicians advocating anti-poverty measures, especially in agriculture.

However, Colin Poulton, a research fellow at the Soas Centre for Development, Environment and Policy, argues in a recent working paper that it is not that simple. Questioning what motivates governments' electoral strategies, Poulton explains that many politicians are more likely to rely on ethnic allegiances and social/political control to secure votes rather than advocating popular policy solutions.

To learn more about his research findings and their implications, Africa Portal intern Vanessa Humphries spoke to him:

Vanessa Humphries: What prompted your initial research focus on the political economy of agricultural policy in Africa?

Colin Poulton: I have a background as an economic agriculturalist, concentrating on agriculture policy in Africa. Throughout my work, I have questioned what motivates states to pursue particular policies. Finding that the answer is rooted in the political systems of a country, I wanted to examine if over 15 years of democratization in African countries has translated into making governments more accountable to the rural majority, or encouraged pro-poor agricultural policy and investment.

VH: As your research shows, democratization has not necessarily encouraged pro-poor agricultural policies. Is this what you expected to uncover?

CP: We expected to see democratisation having a slightly stronger impact than we did; what we found instead was competitive clientelism, with different groups competing to give handouts to voters, such as input subsidy programs for fertiliser or seed vouchers.

So voters are getting something in exchange for their vote, but it tends to be small — a long way from a coherent agricultural policy — and it certainly neglects medium- to long-term investments in public goods, such as research, extension or building the capacity of state agents.

So far the focus on African policy debates in agriculture is more technical, and not sufficiently political. What we have learned from our research is that a careful political analysis must accompany technical recommendations.

VH: Your findings reveal the strongest incentives for political action on pro-poor agricultural policy come not from democratic elections, but from economic dependence on the agriculture sector and perceived rural threats to regime survival. What are the implications of these findings for policy makers?

CP: Of the two factors, it is the rural threat to a regime that has the strongest influence on pro-poor policy. Ethiopia, for example, is a country where there are a number of threats to the current government. The previous two regimes have fallen because they neglected rural areas which became bases for insurgency movements.

To prevent this history from repeating, the current regime knows they have to provide broad-based benefits in rural areas to consolidate their rule. As such, they have been investing heavily in agricultural extension services and pro-poor agricultural policy. It is also striking that that in countries such as Ethiopia and also Rwanda, where the imperative for rapid rural growth is the strongest, regimes are driven to do so by threats to their survival.

Both countries are investing in land-titling programs which provide farmers with increased security that benefits of land investment will come back to them, rather than be reallocated to someone else down the line. But it is interesting that the Rwandan and Ethiopian regimes are pushing for such policies as they are letting go of a mechanism of control that they potentially had over people.

At the central level these regimes are not known for allowing a full range of political freedoms, but at the grassroots level they are transferring to greater control to individuals. In other countries in our sample we see that a chief's control over land becomes very much a part of the political process. When a government gets a chief on their side, the chief can influence votes through excluding access to new land or granting land to people who are supporting the right political party.

This discretionary allocation is part of how governments retain power and control of the political process. In such cases, if a donor or technocrat proposes a land-titling program on the grounds that it would benefit rural growth, the political incentives would not be there.

VH: If political incentives are an important predictor for the adoption of certain agricultural policies, are you saying the same recommendations made to countries with different political contexts would be implemented in different ways?

CP: Yes, this is a very important message. A lot of agricultural policy debate in Africa is concentrated on finding something that works in one place and suggesting it be done in another. What our research shows, however, is that you have to look very carefully at the political incentives in different countries, or you could pursue something that has a very different impact in the second place than it did in the first, such as is the case with land-titling.

VH: If you were advising donors or national governments on promoting pro-poor agricultural policy, how would you translate your research findings into practical recommendations?

CP: So far the focus on African policy debates in agriculture is more technical, and not sufficiently political. What we have learned from our research is that a careful political analysis must accompany technical recommendations. Political backing must be there.

The big challenge is for donors; some African countries that have strong incentives to invest in agricultural may not have free and fair elections that the west approves of, for example. In political discourse about aid policy in the UK, and I assume the United States as well, this is a message that is difficult to communicate. The assumption is that 'all good things go together' and our findings suggest that this is not the case.

VH: What policy audience do you think will benefit most from your research?

CP: I think future research is needed before it becomes really useful to donors, but the next group that should find it very interesting is civil society. This research really sheds light on the importance of building awareness among rural populations about the power of their votes. Ultimately, civil society has an important role in downplaying ethnic differences.

The striking thing is that poor smallholder farmers in central Kenya feel they have more in common with the wealthy elite in their area, rather than a poor farmer in western Kenya. But if you want to start getting investment in national public goods that benefit smallholder farmers, people need to start thinking, 'Where do my interests really lie? What do I really need from the presidential candidate in return for my vote?'

This sort of thinking can be influenced through civil society campaigns. The next big research question is to look at how influential such groups can be in Africa.

To find out more about Colin Poulton's research findings, read his working paper Democratisation and the Political Economy of Agricultural Policy in Africa

Child rapes, killings terrify parents

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 01:01:00 +0000

The brutal crimes struck a nerve, even in a country that has seen a horrific amount of bloodshed in the past decade: Young Iraqi girls kidnapped, repeatedly raped and then bludgeoned to death in two separate incidents near the southern city of Basra.

Despite a conviction in one case, a handful of arrests in the other and beefed up police patrols in the city, families in Basra remain on edge following the murders of 4-year-old Banin Haider and 5-year-old Abeer Ali in a span of less than two months.

Now, many parents in and around the city won't let their children go to school alone or even play outside after class is out, fearing their daughters, too, could be snatched off the streets, sexually abused and murdered.

Others are making plans to leave Basra altogether, saying they have lost confidence in the security forces' ability to keep children safe. "These inhuman crimes make me think of the safety of my children," said Hazim Sharif, 38, a government employee and father of four.

"I do not trust the security forces any more. I have to protect my family by myself." To many in Iraq, the murders mark a new, more menacing type of violence than the country has previously encountered — at least in public.

Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, is considerably safer than Baghdad, and the recent attacks are seen as a particularly dark spot on an otherwise relatively quiet and stable province. The city of about 1 million and its surrounding province, which goes by the same name, is Iraq's main oil industry hub.

The region is generally poorer and shabbier than the capital, but it is slowly beginning to flourish as international companies move in, attracted by the region's lucrative oil fields.

Basra police chief Maj. Gen. Faisal al-Ibadi and the head of the security committee in nearby Zubair, Mahdi Rikan, provided detailed accounts of the two cases to The Associated Press.

Banin was kidnapped Aug. 16 in Zubair, a rundown town just outside the city of Basra. Her family, from the nearby province of Dhi Qar, had come to town to visit relatives. Police later found her body in a derelict area with her hands and legs bound.

She was raped multiple times, and her head was smashed by what was believed to be a large brick, according to authorities. An off-duty soldier assigned to a nearby army base, Akram al-Mayahi, was arrested in connection with the Banin's murder.

He was found guilty on Oct. 22 and sentenced to death for abusing and killing the girl, said judge Jassim al-Moussawi, the spokesman for the Basra Federal Appeals Court. Banin's family wants al-Mayahi to be executed publically at the scene of the crime as a deterrent, al-Ibadi said.

The sentence has yet to be carried out. The other young girl, Abeer, also came from Dhi Qar province, a relatively poor part of Iraq that many residents travel from in search of work, often for weeks at a time. She was abducted Oct. 11 while her family attended a wedding not far from the scene of Banin's murder.

Her body was found 12 hours later in an empty lot, bearing similar signs of trauma to the previous victim, though Abeer was also strangled with a shoelace, officials said. Authorities later determined that the suspected kidnapper phoned nine friends and invited them to take part in the rape.

So far, eight people have been arrested and have confessed. The case has yet to go to trial because the investigation is still under way. Authorities believe the soldier convicted in Banin's killing is not connected to Abeer's murder.

"I cannot rest or sleep while these criminals are still eating, drinking and sleeping in prison. They should be executed immediately," said Abeer's father, Ali Abid, a 30-year-old construction worker and father of four other daughters.

"Iraq has become like a jungle where monsters maul the bodies of the poor people." Reports of the two cases have sent a wave of fear through the streets of Basra. Firas Khudier, 42, a businessman in Zubair, stopped sending his daughter Shahad to kindergarten out of fear she could be abducted.

In the meantime, he has hired a taxi driven by a trusted relative to take his two older children to school even though it is nearby. Sharif, a father of four, said he and his wife have begun escorting their children to school and back, and are keeping a closer eye on them even when they play just outside the house.

Most parents in Basra are now doing the same, he added. "They keep ... insisting on going out to play with their friends, but we have to remind them of the horrific story of the two poor girls," Sharif said.

In an attempt to calm public opinion, security forces have started deploying more police patrols, particularly near schools. Some officials blame a rise in drug use for the crimes. Iraq's Interior Ministry recently cited the cases in calling on Iraqis to support an anti-narcotics campaign.

Al-Ibadi said all of those arrested in the two cases are addicts who were under the influence at the time of the crimes. Fawzia A. al-Attia, a sociologist at Baghdad University, said Iraq's decades of war and economic hardship also likely played a role.

"All these woes changed the social value system, weakened the role of the family and negatively influenced personality development," she said. "Young people in particular have started to feel the emptiness and boredom of unemployment, and (are increasingly disappointed) with religious and political institutions."

Many Basra residents see the focus on drugs as misplaced. They instead criticize Iraq's government and security forces for failing to provide adequate security.

Abid said blaming his daughter's killers' actions on drugs is just a way for the authorities to justify poor policing, saying that all the security forces care "about is the salary they get at the end of the month."

By BUSHRA JUHI and NABIL AL-JURANI

Husband arrested over Shaima death

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

The husband of an Iraqi-American woman who was beaten to death near San Diego in March in a killing initially probed as a possible anti-Muslim hate crime has been arrested in connection with her death, police said on Friday.

Shaima Alawadi, a 32-year-old mother of five, was found bludgeoned to death in her home in the San Diego suburb of El Cajon, home to a large Arab-American population, and died of her injuries several days later. A threatening note found at the scene suggested Alawadi might have been targeted because of her ethnicity.

In a sign of how closely the case was being watched, the U.S. State Department expressed condolences for her death, and Iraqi government officials attended her funeral in Iraq. But while police at the time said they were considering hate as a motive, they warned against definitively drawing such a conclusion.

Court papers filed in the case later painted a portrait of a family in turmoil. "There was not somebody running around doing hate crimes. This was a domestic violence incident," El Cajon Police Chief Jim Redman told a news conference to announce the arrest.

San Diego County jail records show that Alawadi's husband, 48-year-old Kassim Alhimidi, was arrested by police on Thursday evening for first degree murder, and was being held without bail. According to a search warrant affidavit filed in April, a relative of Alawadi told detectives that Alawadi had "been planning on divorcing her husband and moving to the state of Texas."

Divorce papers were found in her car. El Cajon is in the heart of East San Diego County, which is home to the second largest Iraqi community in the United States, behind Detroit. More than half of El Cajon's 100,000 residents are of Middle Eastern descent.

By Mary Slosson

Iraqis spared jail for abusing relative

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Members of an Iraqi family in Arizona who beat a teenage relative and padlocked her to a bed after she violated their traditional values by chatting to a male friend were spared jail time in a plea deal approved by a county judge on Tuesday.

In exchange for a guilty plea, Yusra Farhan, 51, was sentenced to two years probation on a charge of unlawful imprisonment of her daughter, 19-year-old Aiya Altameemi, at the family's Phoenix home in February, court officials said.

The young woman's father, Mohammed Altameemi, also received two years probation for disorderly conduct, and her 18-year-old sister, Tabarak Altameemi, received an identical sentence for assault, officials said.

Prosecutors said the incident started when Aiya was spotted leaving her high school with a young man. The father and younger daughter Tabarak confronted the young woman. Police said Mohammed Altameemi became angry and took her home, striking her several times.

Mother Farhan and daughter Tabarak also admitted to tying her to a bed with a rope around her waist that was secured with a padlock and beat her, according to court records. Farhan told police she hit her daughter because she "was speaking to a male subject and her Iraq culture states a female is not allowed to be having contact with males because females are not allowed to have boyfriends," court records said.

Aiya told school officials about the incident two days later and explained that "her family is trying to protect her and they want her to be a virgin for an arranged marriage," according to court documents. A county attorney spokesman declined comment on the sentence.

Attorneys for the young woman's family members could not be reached for comment. This is the latest high-profile violence case in Arizona involving an Iraqi immigrant. In April 2011, Faleh Hassan Almaleki received 34 1/2 years in prison for running down his 20-year-old daughter in a Phoenix parking lot in what was described as an "honor killing."

The Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, D.C., has said such cases are isolated instances that occur sporadically and are widely chastised by the American Muslim community.

By David Schwartz

Erbil and 'the other' Iraq

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Former journalist Muhammad Jambaz, who is arranging my trip from Erbil to Duhok, shares my fears about our proximity to one of the world's most dangerous cities. He assures me that we won't be going there - and if we did, I'd be arrested.

As we approach the heavily guarded border post, my Christian driver Landie takes a swift and deliberate right turn, bypassing the city by just a few kilometres. Mosul sits on the other side of the de facto border between the autonomous zone of Iraqi Kurdistan and Iraq proper: my 10-day tourist visa, handed out free to Western travellers on arrival in Erbil, the capital, won't allow me outside of this bubble.

It's a flat, dusty and rather bleak bubble, but right now I'm happy to be in it. We cross the River Tigris, heading north towards Turkey, and stop at a roadside cafe where my 22-year-old guide Mohamed, a Sunni, ex-Peshmerga fighter from Khanaqin who claims his father taught him to use an AK-47 at the age of 8, treats me to Iraqi guss, a kebab sandwich of grilled beef and sliced tomatoes in samoona, a half moon-shaped bread.

It's around here that in 331BC, at the enormous Battle of Arbela, Alexander the Great defeated the Persian king Darius III, leading to the fall of the vast Achaemenid Empire. Not that Mohamed knows or cares about any of this: he is too busy focused on rap music and "getting to America. That's my dream". The two-lane road rises slowly across flat rolling plains that in a few months will be green fields.

"That road is the biggest danger you'll face," a British oil worker at the Erbil Rotana hotel had told me that morning at breakfast. "There's no air ambulance, so it will take them three hours to reach you and then three hours to get back."

Then I remembered a friend telling me that Top Gear had filmed here for the programme's 2010 Christmas special: "Jeremy Clarkson is the BBC's cash cow. I don't think they'd risk him." On the drive to Duhok, Mohamed, who works in the planning section of the tourism board, rails constantly about corruption, the violence he's seen, living under sanctions, the cost of living, the stupidity of war, Al Qaeda and how Iraqis in this part of the country are trying to move forward.

Given the number of casualties of the 2003 US-British invasion and the chaos that followed elsewhere in the country - some NGOs have put the number of dead at more than a million - I'm not at all convinced that the cost of getting rid of Saddam Hussein was worth it.

Yet this part of the country, which sits on 45 billion barrels of oil, is now booming, with businessmen pouring in from all over the world. Ironically, Iraqis from outside the Kurdish zone are now flocking here because it is so much safer. Sulaf, a pleasant resort village in the wooded mountains 30km north-east of Duhok, and only 17km from the Turkish border, is crowded with Iraqi holidaymakers from Baghdad, Kerbala and Najaf. I experience some stares, but no hostility.

We then reach Amediya, a striking, 1,000-metre-high hilltop town dating back 5,000 years. The town has been destroyed and rebuilt so many times there are few ancient monuments to see, but it's still very much lived in, making the Badinan Gate, a pre-Islamic stone structure with some carved figures and inscriptions, perched on the side of the hill, all the more evocative.

On our way back to Duhok we stop at Ashawa, a scenic spot in the Zawita valley with a dammed lake and lush riverbed. In one section, hundreds of Iraqis are gathered along a stream lined with restaurants, eating, bathing and smoking shisha to the sound of loud pop music. We have a delicious meal of chicken tikka and soup before heading back to Erbil.

Even though most of its parts are closed for renovation, the Erbil Citadel (free to enter) attracts around 7,000 visitors per month. That's one for every year of its existence. According to Unesco, it's the oldest continuously inhabited settlement on Earth and "one of the most dramatic and visually exciting cultural sites not only in the Middle East but the world".

The ongoing restoration project, started in 2008, has removed all but one family from the site, which was divided into three distinct areas. The drama of it is undeniable: some 500 buildings, rebuilt countless times over the years, are clustered on top of a circular, 30m-high mound that dominates the centre of the city.

The brick-built exterior walls vary in the authenticity of their appearance, thanks to wanton destruction and ad hoc renovation work. We visit the hammam of Qasim Agha Abdullah Agha, built in 1775, and the ruins of several grand houses, known as diwan khanas, featuring courtyards, columns and balconies overlooking the city and Shar Garden Square.

As the sun sets over the southern gate - tragically demolished in the 1950s and renovated in 1979, with a giant statue of the 12th-century historian Mubarak Ahmad Ibn Al Mustawfi - we wander down into the city.

Notwithstanding the less-than-exciting exterior appearance of the souq, as we stand beside the citadel mound with the call to prayer echoing and the hawkers setting up their stalls, it feels a bit like a cross between the old cities of Damascus and Sana'a, though on a smaller scale.

We buy some crunchy, fresh dates and return to our hotel via Sami Abdel Rahman Park, a large, attractively landscaped area filled with people out for an evening walk. "This was an Iraqi Army training camp and detention centre under Saddam," says our guide in Erbil, Mustafa. "It was bulldozed after he went."

There is a monument to Kurdish resistance with a simple banner reading "Freedom is not free". We move on to Minaret Park, built around the ornate 12th-century Mudhafaria minaret, 36m high, and Mustafa points out several dozen stone busts of Kurdish martyrs, including the student Layla Qasim.

"Saddam killed her," Mustafa adds bluntly as the new Erbil Telefrique, or cable car, moves slowly overhead. Back at our hotel, the Erbil Rotana, one of just two five-star hotels in the city, is full of businessmen pitching construction ideas to a large trade fair.

To get into it, we - and all our bags - are scanned by security guards. Although security in the city is tight, there is a rightful sense that complacency shouldn't become the norm. The hotel's rack rate is a hefty US$450 (Dh1,650) a night, though Maulawy Jabar Wahab, the head of the general board of tourism, hopes that "competition" will bring prices down.

Currently, Hilton, Kempinski, Sheraton and Marriott properties are either planned or under construction. Wahab says tourist numbers have risen sharply since 2007, although most visits come from elsewhere in Iraq. Most foreign visitors are travelling on business, but the Kurdistan regional government recorded more than 132,000 foreign tourist arrivals in 2009, a 150 per cent increase on 2007.

"In 2007 we only had 106 hotels, now we have 412," says Wahab. "We hope that next year tourism will bring in $5billion [Dh18.3bn]." Ironically, with regional turmoil stopping visits to counties such as Lebanon and Syria, and business continuing to boom, Wahab could well get his wish.

The existence of new shopping malls and roads full of new cars - mostly white Hyundais but also Hummers, Bentleys and the odd Lamborghini - enhances the general sense of affluence. Donna Osment, an American who visited her husband on business with their 17-year-old son over the summer and toured Erbil and Shaqlawa, said she found the history and culture "fascinating".

"There are no real tourist maps or brochures but there's so much to see and do. The food was awesome, shopping and driving were adventures and there was not a time when I felt unsafe." Although the US State Department still advises against travel to the whole of Iraq, much lower security costs for businessmen make it a more viable base than elsewhere in the country.

The UK's Foreign and Commonwealth office says "there are no restrictions in place against travel to the Kurdistan region, as the risk of terrorism is markedly lower than elsewhere in Iraq". Kamyar Salavati, an Iranian architecture student on holiday with his sister and mother, was less effusive about the area as a tourist destination. "I guess Erbil is going to be a small Dubai but, right now, it hasn't much to offer.

Maybe in eight or 10 years. The people are hospitable, but public transportation isn't that good, it is hot and there is a lot of dust in the air. There isn't much to see, only the Citadel, which wasn't very special in comparison to Iran or Turkey's architectural masterpieces."

When we visit the Pank Resort near Rawanduz the next day, it certainly seems like a long way to go for a small fairground in the mountains. The Rawanduz Gorge, however, is striking and I enjoy the drive, though I imagine it will be more scenic during winter, from November to April.

The Suleymaniya-based travel company Kurdistan Adventures, which offers an eight-day guided tour, stresses the importance of a knowledgeable local guide. Shannon Skerrit, its managing director, adds: "We believe Iraqi Kurdistan has so much to offer the intrepid traveller - the region is practically unspoilt by mass tourism.

The landscape is incredibly varied, with fertile valleys, stunning waterfalls, rolling green hills and snow-capped mountains." For Stuart Butler, a co-author of the Lonely Planet guide to the Middle East, one of the region's main selling points is that it's new. "For decades Iraq has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Most people would regard a visit to anywhere in Iraq as potentially suicidal.

This might sometimes be the case for the rest of the country, but Iraqi Kurdistan is different. There's no doubting that actual physical tourist attractions are somewhat lacking, but right now Iraqi Kurdistan offers a rare chance to see nation building in progress."

As I sit down that evening to enjoy a fabulous dinner at the vast Dawa restaurant, next to the Erbil International Fair Ground, and later smoke shisha in the garden of an upmarket cafe called the Marina in Ankawa, it's hard to get over the fact that we're just 320km from Baghdad.

Leaving the next day from the new $400-million, state-of-the-art airport, it's heartbreaking to see that domestic flights listed on the departures board include UNHCR and Red Cross departures to Baghdad. Nowhere does the gulf between Iraqi Kurdistan and the rest of the country feel more real than now.

IF YOU GO 

The flight Emirates (www.emirates.com) flies direct from Dubai to Erbil from Dh3,060 return, including taxes.

The tour Kurdistan Adventures (www.kurdistan-adventures.com) has an eight-day, fully escorted 'Highlights of Kurdistan' tour of Erbil, Lalish, Duhok, Sulav, Amadiya, Koya, Dukan, Suleymaniya, Ahmad Awa and Halabja from around US$3,000 (Dh11,000) per person, full board, including accommodation, transport, a guide and entrance fees

by Rosemary Behan

A Historic Election for Veterans

noreply@blogger.com (Welcome) — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

The 2012 election was historic for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. A record high 42 new veterans ran for Congress in 2012. Sixteen of these candidates won their bids for Congress yesterday, and two more are in races still too close to call. Voters sent the first female veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan to Congress.

In Illinois, voters of the 8th district elected Tammy Duckworth (D-IL). While she was deployed in Iraq, Duckworth's helicopter was shot down and she sustained severe injuries, losing both legs and the partial use of her right arm. In Hawaii, voters elected Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), who deployed to Iraq and to Afghanistan as part of the Hawaii National Guard.

In Arizona's second district, Martha McSally (R-AZ), an Air Force pilot who flew missions supporting the war in Afghanistan, is locked in a race that is too close too call. Depending on how the final two races are resolved, these women will be part of the between 17 and 19 Members of Congress who have deployed Iraq and Afghanistan, a dramatic increase over the ten currently serving.

Some of their names are already familiar, like current Congressmen Steve Stivers (R-OH) and Duncan Hunter (R-CA). Some we'll get to know over the next two years. Take Tom Cotton, for instance, who was elected to represent Arkansas's 4th district. A graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law School, Cotton left his career in law to serve his country in the Army.

He deployed to Iraq as an infantry officer in 2006, returned home to lead a platoon at the Old Guard in Arlington National Cemetery, and then deployed again to Afghanistan as an operations officer for a provincial reconstruction team in 2008.

He's just one of the new veterans who will be freshmen in Congress next year. The 42 new veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who ran for Congress in 2012 are Republicans and Democrats. They are men and women. Their names were on ballots in districts scattered across the nation. They served in almost every branch of the military, and in the Active-Duty, Guard and Reserve.

They certainly do not agree on every policy position, but two things unify them: They all were part of the less than one percent that served their countries in Iraq or Afghanistan, and they all returned home ready to continue serving in Congress. Such dedication to service is exactly the spirit of this New Greatest Generation.

It's evident in spirit of service that sent many veterans to volunteer in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. It's evident in the leadership veterans bring to companies and businesses across the country. Together, the 2.5 million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have enormous potential and stand ready to lead this country just as the Greatest Generation did after WWII.

As a country, we must continue to invest in the potential of this New Greatest Generation. Throughout the election, IAVA called on candidates from both parties to have a plan to address the challenges facing veterans and their families. Each of the new veterans elected to Congress yesterday will have the unique opportunity to fight for their fellow veterans.

But before they arrive, Congress must act to pass key legislation pending before them today that addresses veteran employment, education and suicide.

By Kate O'Gorman for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. www.IAVA.org is the country's first and largest nonprofit, nonpartisan organization for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and has more than 125,000 veteran members and civilian supporters nationwide. Its mission is to improve the lives of this country's newest generation of veterans and their families. As a non-partisan organization, IAVA does not endorse any candidate for office.